Twitter Inc. today announced that it will ban all political advertising starting in late November, cutting off a potentially large revenue stream for the microblogging service in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

In a series of tweets, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey explained the move was being motivated by a belief that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

Dorsey went on to explain that “a political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.”

The ban applies not only to direct political advertising but also “issue ads” by any group. “We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent,” Dorsey explained. “Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we’re stopping these too.”

Dorsey added that the terms of the new policy will be formally announced Nov. 15, with the ban going into effect Nov. 22.

The decision by Twitter to ban political advertising is being compared to the current controversy surrounding Facebook Inc. That started when the Trump 2020 campaign ran an ad alleging that former Vice President Joe Biden extorted Ukraine to have a prosecutor fired who was investigating a company that employed Biden’s son. The advertising was alleged to be a fake conspiracy theory and led to others posting outright fake videos to test Facebook’s rules.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did address the issue on an earnings call following the social networking giant’s third-quarter earnings, saying that “from a business perspective, it might be easier for us to choose a different path than the one that we’re taking. Today is certainly a historical moment of social tension and I view an important role of our company as defending free expression…. In a democracy, I don’t think it’s right for private companies to sensor politicians or the news.”

Zack Allen, director of threat operations at cybersecurity firm ZeroFOX Inc., told SiliconANGLE that Twitter now has a job deciding what precisely is a political ad.

“Although banning political ads can help prevent some of the attacks and known info operation ads that were bought for 2016, the company will need to decide how to define political ads,” Allen said. “Jack did say they would publish the policy on Nov. 15, but information operation campaigns are known to circumvent terms of service, so there will still be some ads that will fall through the cracks.”

Indeed, eMarketer Senior Analyst Jasmine Enberg told SiliconANGLE, “Given the nature of the platform, people, publishers and politicians will still use Twitter to discuss politics organically, meaning that it won’t fully solve the problem of misinformation.”

The next step for the social networks, Enberg added, is to ban bots and artificial influence, where people can pay for likes or retweets. “This is a harder problem as agencies behind these operations have circumvented anti-bot technologies through clever use of automation, headless browsers and click farms,” she said “We saw this with the Twitter Hong Kong dataset, where a number of posting apps, languages and strategies were used to try to influence the Hong Kong protests.”

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